Being a ‘green’ nation will take a lot of ‘green’

August 11, 2012

Mitt Romney recently was bashed in a Charleston newspaper for being critical of green energy programs, which he supported when he was governor of Massachusetts. When you consider what green energy programs are doing to the European economy, you will be thankful the GOP candidate for president did change his position on green energy.

Many people believe that we should eliminate the use of carbon fuels as a source of energy. They would have us eliminate the use of coal, oil and natural gas and replace these fossil fuels with renewal energy such as wind, solar, and bio fuels like ethanol. What these people don't talk about is the cost of this conversion and the lack of availability of these sources of energy.

According to a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by Jean Isaac, Denmark has the highest energy prices in Europe. Yet they have elected to reduce the country's CO2 emissions (caused by burning fossil fuels) by 40 percent by 2020 and eliminate the use of fossil fuels completely by 2050. The column estimates that turning to alternate fuels has cost Great Britain 10,000 jobs in one year alone and that industry is facing an energy increase of 143 percent by the year 2020. Also in Great Britain developing wind power is projected to cost every household $8,972, while conventional energy would have cost only 5 percent of that. In Spain, subsidies to use alternate fuels has caused 3.4 percent of all household income to be spent on these fuels and has caused the loss of 110,500 jobs. Italy's subsidy system sets the price of wind energy at three times the market level, which has resulted in the cost of creating one green job to be enough money to create 6.9 jobs if this money had been invested in industry. Germany requires electric utilities to buy renewable energy from all sources at fixed exorbitant prices, causing an electric executive to say that it makes as much sense to develop solar power in Germany as it does to grow pineapples in Alaska.

Shale gas, an inexpensive form of energy, is being developed in this country. While there is some concern of developing shale gas in the U.S., Germany has imposed a moratorium on its development and France completely forbids shale gas development by law.

The title of Isaac's column is "Europe's Green Energy Suicide" and she said, "Evidence is mounting daily that manmade global warming is a phony apocalypse but its effect in depressing living standards is all too real." Too bad that Obama has joined with the greens and is trying to lead us down the European path of economic self-destruction.